Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Knocking down the big lies (and little ones).

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It’s not typical for me to blog about the same topic two weeks in a row, but it’s a little hard for me to turn my attention away from the bloodletting in Gaza. As someone who has been following this conflict from a comfortable distance for five decades, it has always been a prominent issue for discussion and disagreement. (I can recall arguing with my friends in Junior High about it, probably on the occasion of the 1973 war or shortly thereafter.)

As most conflicts, it is fueled largely with lies – a category that includes distortions, misleading tropes, and outright falsehoods. You’ve heard the really big lies on basically any news channel you watch or listen to. Most of the pro-war voices you’ll hear read off of the same lies / talking points used by the Israeli government and military. Let’s look at some of these points:

Big Lie #1: Israel has a right to defend itself like any other nation

This is a handy one, as it sets out a pretty simple principle that’s hard for most people to counter, all things being equal. But all things are not equal. Some nations are strong, others not so much. Israel, for instance, has one of the most powerful militaries in the world; it also has the active support of the planet’s last remaining superpower (spoiler alert: it’s the United States).

That means states like Israel have both the right and the ability to defend themselves. On the other hand, weak societies, including stateless peoples like the Palestinians, have the same right but far less ability. So while the statement is, on its face, almost obviously true, it is meaningless in the context of this lopsided conflict.

Big Lie #2: Hamas uses the Palestinian people as “human shields”

This one usually comes in the form of criticizing Hamas for having offices in populated areas. First of all, Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, so there’s no strategic depth for Hamas. Second, Hamas is the government of Gaza, so naturally they have an official presence in neighborhoods throughout the territory’s urban zones. Third, what does the IDF think? That Hamas is going to stand out in the middle of a field with targets on their backs, waiting for Israel’s U.S. supplied munitions to blow them to bits? Not a realistic expectation, frankly.

In any case, I’m sure the Israeli government and military have offices all over Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other population centers, so this point is blatantly hypocritical.

Big Lie #3: The IDF is the world’s most humane military

This one is frankly infuriating. Sure, the Israeli military sometimes calls the owner of a building before they blow it up. But they also just blow things up in the middle of the night. If they’re so obsessed with minimizing civilian casualties, why do they use high explosives in densely populated areas? It’s quite predictable that people are going to die in large numbers if you do that. If the IDF’s intent is truly not to kill civilians, then they’re either completely disingenuous or the worst shots anyone has ever seen.

My own feeling is that they seek to cause pain and misery for the population in Gaza with this military campaign because that is what they do in the non-military context all the time. They are still punishing the Palestinians for voting for Hamas in 2006. They want them to turn on Hamas out of anger and frustration and overthrow their administration. Where’s the humanity in that?

I could go on, but that’s probably enough. There’s a lot more to say about all of these issues, and I will try to address some of that in other contexts, on Strange Sound, on Twitter, and elsewhere. This killing is unacceptable, and Americans need to use our leverage to stop it now.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

When brute strength gets construed as virtue.

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We’re witnessing another paroxysm of killing in the occupied territories of what was once mandate Palestine, the Israelis using their first-world military capabilities against a captive populations with at best pathetic means of self-defense. Much has been written, broadcast, etc., about the proximate cause of this latest bloodbath. I am somewhat persuaded by the argument that it may be a function of Netanyahu’s inability to form a coalition government for the umpteenth time. The best way to get the religious bigot and neo-fascist blocks on your team is to start blowing Palestinians to bits.

Whatever the specific heinous sequence of events, this is just Israel “mowing the lawn” once again, dropping bombs on one of the most densely populated regions on earth, rampaging through Al Aqsa mosque, beating the living hell out of young Palestinians and killing as many as they can manage. (See my posts on the 2014 edition of this story.) You have no doubt heard endless condemnations of rockets being fired into Israel from the open-air prison that is Gaza, but make no mistake: these are toys compared to what’s being dropped on Gazans every day and every night. The power differential between the two sides is absolute.

Rights to exist.

There is no question but that Israel is legitimately a country. It has a highly problematic origin story and was founded on massive violence and displacement, like every other country, including and especially the United States. So within the pre-1967 borders, it has rights and responsibilities. Beyond those borders, in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in the Golan, it has only responsibilities, no rights. Our international order is less than ideal, but to the extent that there is a law of nations, that principle is at the center of it.

Palestinians have national rights, even though they don’t currently have a nation state. But because of their forced separation from their homeland, they are not seen by our foreign policy establishment as having the right to self-defense, to a decent living, to be free from the hand of oppressors, and so on. It is therefore up to us to ensure that their right to exist as a people is duly recognized.

Cracks in the apartheid wall.

Because of the degree to which the Israeli military relies on direct aid from us, popular opinion on Israel-Palestine in the United States is crucial. Up until recent years, the only voices you would hear on the mainstream media were those of Israeli PR flacks. But as the Intercept has reported, this is changing the same way public perception of police violence in the U.S. is changing – largely due to the fact that smart phone cameras make millions of people amateur photo journalists and documentary filmmakers.

Now raw footage of Israeli troops abusing Palestinians, marauding through their places of worship, their schools, etc., is available to compete with the carefully crafted video being generated by the IDF. Beyond that, a broader range of voices can now be heard on corporate media, such that actual substantive criticism of Israeli policy makes its way onto the airwaves to a greater extent than it did just a few years ago. That’s a remarkable shift that reflects shifting sentiments around the nation.

This is not the first atrocity committed against Palestinians and it won’t be the last. As Americans, we need to do what we can to move our government closer to a reasonable position on this conflict. Right now, their heads are in the 1980s – we need to snap them out of it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Making heroes out of false friends.

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There are a few things we can say definitively about the mainstream media. One is that they tend to latch onto the most superficial issues imaginable and cover them with mind-numbing repetitiveness. Another is that they love, love, LOVE the two-party system and believe in the concept bipartisanship more than any normal human being.

When I say bipartisanship, what I mean is any effort to reach across the aisle, compromise, and reach consensus between the two major parties on legislation, appointments, and so on. The media’s fealty to this concept is pretty much absolute, and mostly makes no allowance for the fact that (a) bipartisanship has kind of a toxic history, and (b) one of the two major parties has gone bat-crap crazy over the past 30-40 years.

Toxic consensus

When I think of bipartisan legislation, I think of the 1994 Crime Bill, so-called “welfare reform”, the Patriot Act, the resolution to authorize the use of force in the War on Terror and to extend that authority to Iraq, and so on. Suffice to say, a lot of misery and death has been strewn in the wake of bipartisanship over the years, and I don’t think it’s coincidental.

The same might be said of presidential appointments, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court. John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and even Neil Gorsuch were confirmed on a bipartisan basis, lopsidedly so in the first two cases. The Democrats who voted to confirm these justices bear some responsibility for the results of their opinions.

Praising the maverick

If you’re old enough, you remember the degree to which the press loved John McCain, mainly because he straddled the center-line in a politically strategic fashion. It’s typically enough for these “mavericks” to adopt a controversial opinion on a single topic for them to be carried on the shoulders of the mainstream media. For McCain, it was campaign finance. For Liz Cheney, it’s Donald Trump.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard MSNBC talk about a congressional representative more than they have about Liz Cheney over the last two weeks. They’re doing this on the basis of her refusal to accept her party’s line on who won the presidency in 2020. In other words, she’s being roundly praised for speaking a very simple, obvious truth. As a result, they are helping her build her national brand in a dramatic way, though she voted to support Trump’s agenda from one end of his regime to the other.

Don’t buy it!

Bottom line, MSNBC and other mainstream outlets are working overtime to mainstream extremists like Liz Cheney as well as Wall Street reactionaries like Mitt Romney. As people on the left, we can’t adopt the standard of the enemy of our enemy being our friend. These people are building a national brand that they hope will carry them to higher office. The difference between that and a Trump 2.0 presidency is one of degree, not of kind.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Living through another Cuba Obsession.

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The Biden administration has essentially balked on its Cuba policy, saying through its State Department spokesperson that they are reviewing the policy set by their grisly predecessors and that they will, in essence, get back to us. Meanwhile, the people of Cuba are slowly dangling in the breeze, still under sanction from the global superpower 90 miles to the north, no relief in sight.

I’m not surprised, inasmuch as this administration make no pretense of departing from the imperial line when they were trawling for votes last year. As I’ve mentioned many times, Biden’s campaign web site contained almost no foreign policy position papers, and the ones they did post were bank-shot policies related to some domestic concern. The utility of that strategy is obvious – for the left, there’s nothing to push back against; for the centrists and right-wing Democrats, if they fill in the blank with what’s in their heads, they won’t be far from wrong.

Ned’s price

It’s worth listening to what the State Department Spokesperson said about Cuba a few days ago. Aside from the ongoing policy review process, he said U.S. policy is focused on “democracy” and “human rights”, that it’s up to the Cuban people what they think of their own leadership succession, and that U.S. citizens “tend to be the best ambassadors for freedom in Cuba.” Really? Let’s interrogate these notions for a few moments.

First, democracy. The United States is selective in its application of this principle. There is zero democracy, for instance, in Saudi Arabia, and yet they are not under sanction – far from it; they get arms, trade, you name it. Cuba, on the other hand, has been under punitive sanctions my entire lifetime, and I am sixty two. I know inconsistency is a weak charge against states and politicians, but the very idea that we think of democracy as a value is simply ludicrous.

No, Cuba is not a formal democracy along the lines of the U.S. As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, any comparison between Cuba and the United States is meaningless because of the power/wealth differential. But honestly – look at what the U.S. considers democracies in the Western Hemisphere, like Haiti.

Vox populi in Haiti

Do ordinary people in Haiti have more of a voice in public affairs than citizens of Cuba? Yes, they have elections, but their elections are meaningless. The head of the only mass-based political party in Haiti – Lavalas – was deposed from the presidency twice by the military, with the tacit or open support of the United States. Haiti is shot through with investment capital from overseas. Once the source of much of France’s wealth, the country cannot support itself, as its agricultural and industrial base has been reconfigured by foreign powers.

Cuba’s liberty is in its independence from the United States, not in electoral politics, which never developed beyond a certain point in the shadow of 60 years of sanction, assassination, terrorism, and attack from El Norte. Which is why Ned Price’s comment about U.S. citizens being “the best ambassadors for freedom in Cuba” is so infuriating. We’ve done nothing but strangle them for six decades. Where’s the freedom in that?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Just desserts.

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It was another one of those moments that will be encoded in our memories, so that people will likely recall long into the future where they were when they heard the news. I know I won’t soon forget the sadness I felt, unexpectedly, when I heard that former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts.

As with most important events, I learned about it from a television announcer while I was in another room, doing something else. My eyes started welling up, and I thought about George Floyd somehow looking down on this sorry society of ours from his perch in the afterlife, or his place in our memories, and smiling. I think the repeated replay of his terrible suffering, over and over through the course of the trial, left a mark on a lot of us, and for me it is a source of tremendous sadness to know that he had to endure such an awful death, so unjustly.

In the shadow of that horrific act, the conviction is cold comfort, but I am glad that his family now has that small measure of solace. And if there is a soul that persists beyond the boundaries of this life, I hope the soul of Mr. Floyd is resting more peacefully now.

I wish I could say I feel confident that this will be some kind of turning point with respect to policing in America. Objectively, the Chauvin conviction is a demonstration of just how much it takes to convict a white police officer for killing a black civilian – namely, a complete video record, many witnesses, police willing to testify against the defendant, and so on. Even then, this was touch and go. That, in itself, is enlightening for white people. (See my take on this last summer.)

What’s more illuminating is the press release the Minneapolis Police Department put out after Floyd’s murder. CNN and other outlets have reported on this recently. Suffice to say that it is a pack of steaming lies. No mention of Chauvin’s knee on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. They claim George Floyd died at the hospital after they had him transported via ambulance when the officers “noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.” Seriously, their credibility is shit. There is no reason to believe a single word these people say.

How often does this happen, when there are no cameras around? How many George Floyds have expired with nothing but an anodyne press release left to cover the tracks of their killers? Those of us who grew up in white America know that this sickness runs as deep as our bones. The racist mission of law enforcement is as foundational as DNA – you can try to reform it, but it will always be there at some level. It takes a lot of work to put that into a box, and we’re only just getting started.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Out now?

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This week, as you likely know, President Biden announced the planned withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, with the last ones leaving sometime before September 11, 2021. Mind you, that is not the anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan, but rather the 20th anniversary of the attacks that we used as a justification to invade Afghanistan (not to mention the 48th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, President of Chile, and the installment of the dictator Augusto Pinochet – another triumph of American foreign policy). As that date is a significant one in the annals of imperialism, I suppose it’s fitting that we should choose it to mark the end our occupation of Afghanistan, assuming we actually go through with it this time. Let us not forget that Trump agreed to pull out by May of this year, and that the Biden team backed away from that. So … we’ll see.

I (and I’m sure, you as well) have heard many, many voices over the past few days warning of the dark consequences that may result from this decision, as qualified and attenuated as it may turn out to be. (For instance, will contractors be removed? Will overflights and drone sorties continue?) There is a cadre of politicians – mostly those who coalesced around John McCain back in the day – who suggest that our best way forward would be to stay in that country permanently. They point to Germany, Japan, and Korea as examples of what positive effects such an endless presence may have. It’s no accident that the chief proponents of this “strategy” tend to be either veterans or people with strong military connections, because they claim some standing on the issue. It’s just that these are all really bad examples. While there’s been a standoff of sorts in Korea for 70 years, we haven’t been engaged in combat in Germany or Japan or, really, Korea the whole time our military has been ensconced in those countries. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has been an active war zone for forty years and more.

Just to be clear – I’m not saying we should wash our hands of Afghanistan altogether. God, no. We owe the Afghans big-time. We owe them for stoking the Mujahideen rebellion in the seventies, years before the Soviet invasion, a policy that led to a grinding war of attrition through the 80s and into the 90s. We owe them for having funded and facilitated that long war, helping the Saudis bankroll the rise of the precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaida, which is a curse that the Afghans suffered from far more than we have . We owe them for attacking their country in 2001, throwing them into another two decades of war, making common cause with their most rapacious warlords, and costing them another 150,000 lives. We owe them for dropping a lot of bank on some of the most corrupt elements in the country, further entrenching oligarchic power and further distorting their society with corruption and neocolonialism.

Suffice to say, it’s time we left Afghanistan for good. And then maybe make an extra effort to help them overcome the problems that we played a key role in causing.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

For the squad.

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I want to preface this post with a simple confession: I’m old. And yes, I am a baby boomer, albeit a late-stage one, so feel free to issue the usual “Okay, boomer” eye-rolls, I totally get it – my generation has had plenty of opportunity to get things right, and we totally blew it. So let me simply say that, as with most of my content, I am speaking for myself, not my fuck-up generation, a goodly portion of which showed promise early on but whose best potential was not ultimately realized. (In truth, only about a third of boomers were on what might be termed as the political left during their youthful prime, so what potential there may have been was not broadly shared.)

That said, as someone who has been watching Congress since his teens, I can vouch for the fact that we have seen progress over the past forty years in increasing representation of the left in the House of Representatives. Yes, we have a long way to go before we can hope to move legislation in a more unapologetically radical direction, but for the first time in my longish life, we have a solid caucus of progressive Democrats who actually support a leftist agenda in both legislation and oversight. What’s more, there are opportunities to expand this caucus in the coming years if progressives and leftists in this country organize and engage in coalition-building between movements, regions, and organizations.

Let me be clear. I do not expect Congressmembers to agree with me on every issue. I am pretty far to the left politically, and if I withhold support from candidates until I find one that aligns with me on every issue, I will end up supporting no one. Forty years ago, the closest I could come to a House member that held views similar to mine was Ron Dellums. Shirley Chisholm was good, as well as a handful of others, but there were typically very serious trade-offs, and the overwhelming majority of Congresspeople back then were older white men. In the 90s and 2000s, Barbara Lee (who started as an aide to Dellums and succeeded him in his seat, I believe) was the only serious progressive in the House, and my expectations were pretty low regarding the Democratic caucus at that time. For instance, I was glad when Nancy Pelosi took over leadership of Congressional Democrats after the drubbing they took in the 2002 election, only because she was slightly more progressive than her predecessor in leadership, Dick Gephardt. (Again …. very limited expectations.)

Compare that with today. Now we have the recently-expanded “squad” – AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Talib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cory Bush, all of whom are way, way to the left of where Congressional progressives were in the 1990s and 2000s. We’ve got solid progressives like Ro Khanna (whose foreign policy views are as nuanced as I’ve ever heard from a sitting Congressmember), Pramila Jayapal, Mondaire Jones, Katy Porter (best interrogator in the House), Dan Kildee, and elders like Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Mark Pocan, etc. There are others as well, like Jamie Raskin, who have strong progressive tendencies on key issues and could lend support on legislation.

Now, admittedly, there is a broad range of views represented by the folks I named above. But overall, the caucus is further to the left than it has ever been throughout my lifetime. And while there’s much left to do, much further to go, this is like a base camp on the side of this mountain we’re climbing. It’s something we can build on from this point forward, if we work together.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fire one.

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Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Imaginary Lines.

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Our press tends to frame subjects in the most superficial ways. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, but sometimes it’s so blatant that it hits you in the face. The “crisis on the border” coverage is frankly kind of shocking, a bit like the talk during the Trump years of “caravans” heading north from the “northern triangle” countries we spent decades rendering ungovernable. Practically every outlet has used the term “crisis” in their headlines. I understand the incentive structure here – if it bleeds, it leads – but what they’re referring to is literally more of the same phenomenon we’ve been seeing on the U.S. southern border for years. It certainly isn’t way out of line from recent months. Stats compiled on Factcheck.org, from CBP numbers, show that crossings are not nearly as high as they were in May 2019 and more or less even with March, April, and June of that year. Was their hair on fire back then?

This is probably a good week to point out that this “crisis” keeps happening because we don’t take any meaningful steps to address it, just as might be said of mass shootings in America. It’s the classic definition of insanity, right? Granted, the influx of people from Central America is not down to one simple cause, but this thing that the right professes to hate like fire is largely a product of the toxic policies they and many of their liberal adversaries have been pursuing since the Second World War and longer. Why are people leaving Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American countries in such large numbers? Because they are failed states, in essence, thanks in no small measure to the so-called anticommunist crusades we undertook in the region from the first decades of the last century. Between bad governance, corruption, and dominance by criminal cartels funded through drug sales to the United States, the northern triangle nations are virtually unlivable for most of their battered citizens. That’s the return on our investment in fascistic governments.

Then there’s the border itself. It’s an imaginary line bristling with armed officers. The fact that it’s highly militarized and that it’s very difficult to make the crossing means that when people come here, they tend to want to stay. I’m not someone who thinks that immigration is an intrinsically bad thing, but there was a time when people could cross the border without a lot of trouble, stay for a while, work, send money home, then return to their families. Now if they manage to survive the crossing, they stay put and send for their families. The very efforts designed to keep people out is, in essence, keeping them in. Frankly, it’s fortunate for us that people want to come here and work. These “illegal immigrants” include many, many essential workers. Think about that for a moment: both illegal and essential. They get food to our tables. They take care of our grandparents. They do the jobs most Americans shun. Why the fuck do we put a target on their backs?

As I said previously, these are not simple issues that can be solved easily. We need to get our heads around what’s causing this misery, year after year, and try to work towards solutions that are radical in that they would necessarily dismantle the systems of oppression and exclusion that we have built over the course of our history. Or …. we could find something easy to do, and just keep complaining about it. Up to us.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

New pilot.

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As I write this, the details are still filtering in from Georgia about the shooting at the massage parlors in and near Atlanta. Yet another sickening crime carried out by some dude who bought a gun the same day he decided to use it on a bunch of innocent people. That’ll be $600, young man. Enjoy the pistol! Want bullets with that? Goddamn, what a crazy country we live in. Still, the part of this incident that made me scratch my head was when the police told us that the suspect had said the crime was not racially motivated. (Of course, this was followed up by the officer’s comment that the alleged shooter was having a bad day.) My first reaction to that was …. since when do you care what the suspect says? The answer, of course, is obvious – the suspect is white. Can you picture them coming out and saying something similar about a black person in custody? Neither can I.

I’m listening to a podcast called Resistance, and though I’m not crazy about the corporate advertising (for instance, I now know way more about the latest Mitsubishi compact SUV than I ever needed to know), they do really good work. The episode I’m listening to, entitled “My Somebody”, focuses on a young man from Baltimore who is incarcerated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can tell you, the police didn’t give a damn what this fellow had to say about his guilt or innocence. They shot him in the face and stood guard around his hospital bed. But then … he’s black. As for the white guy who shot up three massage parlors in Georgia this week, well, he was having a bad day, according to some random (white) police captain known for sharing anti-Asian posts on Facebook. I mean, seriously …. they don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore, do they?

This is what underlies the movement for de-funding and even abolishing the police. If you are a white person, and you grew up in, say, a town like my old home town, which was almost entirely white at that time, the police are there to protect you. In other words, they are there to protect you from the nasty, non-white people down the street in Utica or Albany or Rochester or wherever. If, on the other hand, you are a person of color and you live in a community of color, the police are not there to protect you. They are there to contain you, to detain you, to keep you in your place. They are there to watch you like a hawk. That is why so many black families don’t dial up the cops when stuff goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if there are black police officers, or a black police chief, or a black mayor … or hell, a black president. Like the Pentagon, law enforcement is like a big killing machine. You can put a different pilot in there, and they may drive the killing machine more slowly, even nudge it into reverse, but it’s still going to do what it’s designed to do. The abuse is a feature, not a bug.

There’s a lot to be said about criminal justice reform, and we’ve barely even begun to have that conversation. But if we’re ever going to even attempt to fix these problems, we must first acknowledge the nature of the system we have. That is a prerequisite for moving forward.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.